‘So tell me why this thing,’ Mordred pointed to me with his sword, ‘should not die tonight.’
‘Some years ago, Lord King,’ Taliesin said, ‘the Lord Derfel paid me gold to cast a spell on your wife. The spell caused her to be barren. I used the womb of a doe that I had filled with the ashes of a dead child to perform the charm.’
Mordred looked at Fergal, who nodded. ‘That is certainly one way it can be done, Lord King,’ the Irish Druid confirmed.
‘It isn’t true!’ I shouted and, for my pains, received another raking blow from the bear claws on Loholt’s silver-sheathed stump.
‘I can lift the charm,’ Taliesin went on calmly, ‘but it must be lifted while Lord Derfel lives, for he was the petitioner of the charm, and if I lift it now, while the sun sets, it cannot be done properly. I must do it, Lord King, in the dawn, for the enchantment must be removed while the sun is rising, or else your Queen will stay childless for ever.’
Mordred again glanced at Fergal and the small bones woven into the Druid’s beard rattled as he nodded his assent. ‘He speaks true, Lord King.’
‘He lies!’ I protested.
Mordred pushed his sword back into its scabbard. ‘Why do you offer this, Taliesin?’ he asked. Taliesin shrugged. ‘Arthur is old, Lord King. His power wanes. Druids and bards must seek patronage where the power is rising.’
‘Fergal is my Druid,’ Mordred said. I had thought him a Christian, but was not surprised to hear that he had reverted to paganism. Mordred was never a good Christian, though that, I suspect, was the very least of his sins.
‘I shall be honoured to learn more skills from my brother,’ Taliesin said, bowing to Fergal, ‘and I will swear to follow his guidance. I seek nothing, Lord King, but a chance to use my small powers for your great glory.’
He was smooth. He spoke with honey on his tongue. I had paid him no gold for charms, but everyone there believed him, and none more so than Mordred and Argante. It was thus that Taliesin, the bright-browed, bought me an extra night of life. Loholt was disappointed, but Mordred promised him my soul as well as my hand in the dawn and that gave him some consolation. I was made to crawl back to the hut. I took a beating and kicking on the way, but I lived. Amhar took the leash of hair from my neck, then booted me into the hut. ‘We shall meet in the dawn, Derfel,’ he said.
With the sun in my eyes and a blade at my throat.
That night Taliesin sang to Mordred’s men. They had gathered in the half-finished church that Sansum had started to build on Caer Cadarn, and which now served as a roofless, broken-walled hall, and there Taliesin charmed them with his music. I had never before, and have never since, heard him sing more beautifully. At first, like any bard entertaining warriors, he had to fight the babble of voices, but gradually his skill silenced them. He accompanied himself on his harp and he chose to sing laments, but laments of such loveliness that Mordred’s spearmen listened in awestruck silence. Even the dogs ceased their yelping and lay silent as Taliesin the Bard sang into the night. If he ever paused too long between songs the spearmen demanded more, and so he would sing again, his voice dying on the melody’s endings, then surging again with the new verses, but forever soothing, and Mordred’s folk drank and listened, and the drink and the songs made them weep, and still Taliesin sang to them. Sansum and I listened too, and we also wept for the ethereal sadness of the laments, but as the night stretched on Taliesin began to sing lullabies, sweet lullabies, delicate lullabies, lullabies to put drunken men to sleep, and while he sang the air grew colder and I saw that a mist was forming over Caer Cadarn.
The mist thickened and still Taliesin sang. If the world is to last through the reigns of a thousand kings I doubt men will ever hear songs so wondrously sung. And all the while the mist wrapped about the hilltop so that the fires grew dim in the vapour and the songs filled the dark like wraith songs echoing from the land of the dead.
Then, in the dark, the songs ended and I heard nothing but sweet chords being struck on the harp and it seemed to me that the chords drew closer and closer to our hut and to the guards who had been sitting on the damp grass listening to the music.
The sound of the harp came nearer still and at last I saw Taliesin in the mist. ‘I have brought you mead,’ he said to my guards, ‘share it.’ And he took from his bag a stoppered jar that he handed to one of the guards and, while they passed the jar to and fro, he sang to them. He sang the softest song of all that song-haunted night, a lullaby to rock a troubled world to sleep, and sleep they did. One by one the guards tipped sideways, and still Taliesin sang, his voice enchanting that whole fortress, and only when one of the guards began to snore did he stop singing and lower his hand from the harp. ‘I think, Lord Derfel, that you can come out now,’ he said very calmly.
‘Me too!’ Sansum said, and pushed past me to scramble first through the door. Taliesin smiled when I appeared. ‘Merlin ordered me to save you, Lord,’ he said, ‘though he says you may not thank him for it.’
‘Of course I will,’ I said.
‘Come on!’ Sansum yelped, ‘no time to talk. Come! Quick!’
‘Wait, you misery,’ I said to him, then stooped and took a spear from one of the sleeping guards.
‘What charm did you use?’ I asked Taliesin.
‘A man hardly needs a charm to make drunken folk sleep,’ he said, ‘but on these guards I used an infusion of mandrake root.’
‘Wait for me here,’ I said.
‘Derfel! We must go!’ Sansum hissed in alarm.
‘You must wait, Bishop,’ I said, and I slipped away into the mist, going towards the blurred glow of the biggest fires. Those fires burned in the half-built church that was nothing more than stretches of unfinished log-walls with great gaps between the timbers. The space inside was filled with sleeping people, though some were now waking and staring bleary-eyed like folk stirring from an enchantment. Dogs were rooting among the sleepers for food and their excitement was waking still more people. Some of the newly woken folk watched me, but none recognized me. To them I was just another spearman walking in the night.
I discovered Amhar by one of the fires. He slept with his mouth open, and he died the same way. I thrust the spear into his open mouth, paused long enough for his eyes to open and for his soul to recognize me, and then, when I saw that he knew me, I pushed the blade through his neck and spine so that he was pinned to the ground. He jerked as I killed him, and the last thing his soul saw on this earth was my smile. Then I stooped, took the beard leash from his belt, unbuckled Hywelbane, and stepped out of the church. I wanted to look for Mordred and Loholt, but more sleepers were waking now, and one man called out to ask who I was, and so I just went back into the misted shadows and hurried uphill to where Taliesin and Sansum waited.
‘We must go!’ Sansum bleated.
‘I have bridles by the ramparts, Lord,’ Taliesin told me.
‘You think of everything,’ I said admiringly. I paused to throw the remnants of my beard on the small fire that had warmed our guards, and when I saw that the last of the strands had flared and burned to ash I followed Taliesin to the northern ramparts. He found the two bridles in the shadows, then we climbed to the fighting platform and there, hidden from the guards by the mist, we clambered over the wall and dropped to the hillside. The mist ended halfway down the slope and we hurried on to the meadow where most of Mordred’s horses were sleeping in the night. Taliesin woke two of the beasts, gently stroking their noses and chanting in their ears, and they calmly let him put the bridles over their heads.